Издательство Methuen: История и Современность

UK book publishing company

Methuen Publishing Ltd ('/m//ɛ//θ//j//u//ə//n/; also known as Methuen Books) is an English publishing house. It was founded in 1889 by Sir Algernon Methuen (1856–1924) and began publishing in London in 1892. Initially Methuen mainly published non fiction academic works, eventually diversifying to encourage female authors and later translated works. E. V. Lucas headed the firm from 1924 to 1938.

In June 1889, as a sideline to teaching, Algernon Methuen began to publish and market his own textbooks under the label Methuen & Co. The company's first success came in 1892 with the publication of Rudyard Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads. Rapid growth came with works by Marie Corelli, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde (De Profundis, 1905) as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes. In 1910 the business was converted into a limited liability company with E. V. Lucas and G. E. Webster joining the founder on the board of directors. The company published the 1920 English translation of Albert Einstein's Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition. With knowledge he had gained of children's literature at the publisher Grant Richards, E. V. Lucas built on the company's early success. Among the authors Lucas signed to the company were A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, while he also supported illustrators W. Heath Robinson, H. M. Bateman and E. H. Shepard. By the 1920s it had also a literary list that included Anthony Hope, G. K. Chesterton, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ruth Manning Sanders and The Arden Shakespeare series.

Following the publication of Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915), Methuen was prosecuted for obscenity. The firm offered no defence and agreed to destroy the remaining stock of 1,011 copies. It was thus redrawn and reset in the 1960s. Critics have attacked Methuen over the changes, claiming that The Black Island lost a lot of its charm as a result. Reed sold off its trade publishing to Random House in February 1997. Methuen Drama bought itself out in 1998 while retaining the distribution and warehousing services with Random House. That same year, Reed sold Methuen's children's catalogue to the Egmont Group. Egmont Group sold its UK book division to HarperCollins in 2020. In 2003, Methuen Drama purchased the company Politico's Publishing from its owner Iain Dale. In 2006, Methuen sold its notable drama lists to A & C Black for £2.35 million. Penguin Random House now owns the rights to many books that used to be published under the Methuen name through Random House and the Adrian Mole franchise through Penguin Books, the company also distributed the titles of now independent Methuen Books. Methuen Books continues to publish new works of fiction and non fiction, as well as reprinting older, classic works. Contemporary Methuen authors include Mark Dunn, Robert McKee, Michael Palin, 1986 Nobel Prize Winner Wole Soyinka, and 2012 Nobel Prize Winner Mo Yan. Classic Methuen authors include the US novelist Walker Percy, the US academic and commentator Neil Postman, and the UK cartoonist Norman Thelwell.